Morgan Stanley paid $14.4 billion in 2009 compensation and benefits, up from $12.3 billion in the previous fiscal year. Total compensation expenses equaled 62 percent of Morgan Stanley’s net revenues for 2009, up from about 50 percent of its revenues in the previous year.

Wow. 62% of MS net revenues went to employees.

Goldman sachs also paid nearly 22 billion in compensation to its employees. Gross revenue of 41 billion, means that 53% of gross rev went to its employees.

Now here is Marx on surplus value that workers create:

In hiring an employee, the employer thus not only incurs a cost (the wage-bill, based on hours worked) but also reaps a benefit, namely the extra value the employee creates (the surplus product of labour) beyond the value of what it costs to hire him or her. This benefit, Marx argues, shows up in the form of gross profit income after deduction of costs, but the only real evidence that surplus labour is the cause of it, is that the value of output produced is higher than the value of inputs used to produce it. The economic relation of necessary and surplus labour has therefore become hidden, and the division of enterprise revenues between wages, profits and taxes seems to become a purely distributional issue; just how exactly that new value originated, could be theorised about in all sorts of ways.

Based on Wall Street compensation, it appears that they must be reading Marx in secret lol

Almost all "value" created on Wall St. is surplus value, because it takes their HFT computers a couple milliseconds to front run some trades and make back their costs. I suspect most of that fraudulent surplus value goes to directors and high level execs, as Marx would have guessed.